Day 3: My first new Monday

Payton's ready for school and I have a couple of minutes before we go.  I'm ready to come home and get back to sleep.  I have already taken my morning vitamins and I had a hard boiled egg for breakfast because all of the bowls are in the dishwasher.  I'll have oatmeal for my mid-morning snack and Dan's got a plan for lunch.  I hope it's yummy!

I'm going to start tracking my food again, but I'm not going to look at the nutritional info at least until the end of the day and maybe not until the end of the week.  I just need to take a week and see where I'm going and then rebuild from there.  Baby steps.

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In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the first habit is to be proactive.  This is very much the same as first of The Success Principles, take 100% responsibility.  I know that Jack Canfield cites Stephen R. Covey and now I am seeing the influence.  Taking 100% responsibility is based on the idea that no event is either good or bad, although the results of the event can be.  Jack's equation shows that Event + Response = Outcome.  Stephen's explanation for proactivity takes us back one step further by saying that between the Event or stimulus and the Response is your Choice.  So if we agree that any event is neutral and our response will make it positive or negative, we have to take responsibility for the Choice we made.

What this brings us to is the idea that there can be two equations for any event.  Maybe it's more like a flow chart.  Any event or stimulus presents us with a choice.  We can choose to respond in a negative way or a positive way.  I think that often we don't make a conscious choice.  We just let our emotions or instincts take over rather than being proactive.  We have, in essence, chosen to be impulsive rather than reasoned.  If we don't make a conscious choice, it feels like luck if we get a positive outcome.  We don't take responsibility for that positive choice because it was more of an accident so we do not allow ourselves the personal appreciation for a well made decision.  If we haven't made a conscious choice, and we have a negative outcome, that's because we just have bad luck.  Bad things happen to us and there is nothing we can do about it.  Neither a positive nor a negative outcome will provide us with any personal satisfaction.  We didn't mean to make a choice so we don't feel like we made a choice, thus we cannot accept any satisfaction from a good outcome or blame for a bad outcome.  By not allowing ourselves the opportunity to make a conscious decision, we have undermined our own authority over ourselves and delivered a blow to our own ego.  This can easily lead to a downward spiral in which all of our opportunities to choose are ignored.  We run on emotion rather than intellect and things happen to us.  We lose control of our lives.  We feel out of control because we gave that control up.  As Stephen R. Covey states,  "Because we are, by nature, proactive, if our lives are a function of conditioning or conditions, it is because we have, by conscious decision or by default, chosen to empower those things to control us."

It may be because we are tired.  Maybe there has been so much going on.  Maybe we are weakened by illness.  It doesn't matter what overwhelms us, if we don't make the decision to begin making choices, we can never regain control.  The next reading that I am adding to my own list will be Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.  I've added a wikipedia link to Viktor's name if you want further information.  Man's Search for Meaning chronicles Viktor's experiences as a Jew during the holocaust.  In his journey, he describes how he was able to change his own mind in a way that allowed him intellectual freedom and control even in the midst of the atrocities.  My life has been much less dramatic than his, yet I give in to myself and feel that I am a victim of circumstances.  Learning from Viktor's experience and spirit can only help me move forward as a person.